Posts Tagged ‘maple’

At a stand set up for Igloofest on Place Jacques-Cartier, below Montréal’s Hôtel de Ville, I bought some maple taffy for $C 3. The heated maple syrup cooled very quickly once it was poured onto the ice, quickly becoming edible.

It’s a well-known fact that the maple tree–specifically, the stylized maple leaf–is a national symbol of Canada. There are some maple trees on Prince Edward Island, but they don’t form an overwhelmingly prominent portion of my home province’s native flora. Outside of their southern Canadian heartland, maple trees can be quite scarce. I remember one friend from Alberta who was amused by the profusion of maple trees in Kingston, telling me that now he understood why the maple tree was a Canadian symbol that maple trees tended to sicken and die in the climate of the Prairies. (I leave to the reader, as an exercise, the possibility of this being a metaphorical description of Canada’s future.)

Here in my neighbourhood, in the heartland of the largest city of Canada and in the maple’s home turf, maple trees are everywhere. Right now, the sidewalks are littered with their hard green winged seeds. A week ago, the sidewalks and the pavement and lawns were covered with yellow maple flowers. The flowers were impressive in the trees, but on the ground that they often blanketed several centimetres deep they were definitely worthy of a slower, more appreciative, walk. It didn’t take long before they were mulched, by vehicle passages and by footfalls, but for the brief time that they remained intact the banks were nice to look at.

My allergic sneezing fits started just a couple of days later. They aren’t bad fits, mind, but they’re definitely aggravating. The only thing about spring that I dislike are my allergies. Why can’t my appreciation of reviving nature by limited to aesthetic and intellectual contexts? My body can remain quite neutral on the issue, thank you very much.